


but who will chase the hunters?

by TheHecateA



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:30:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25170142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHecateA/pseuds/TheHecateA
Summary: As Basira follows the beast that was Daisy through London and waits for it to strike, she fails to consider what makes a hunter, what makes prey, and what role she is playing in the Hunt.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Kudos: 7





	but who will chase the hunters?

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note: Johnny Sims really thought he could just tell us that Daisy and Basira were coming back soon without unleashing a wave of anxiety in my gay ass, huh? Anyways, as always I live in fear and I hate myself for this headcanon. Enjoy!  
> Disclaimer: Johnny Sims has no right to do the things he does, except he does have all the rights.  
> Warnings: Canon-compliant apocalypse and violence, alludes to past police misconduct and brutality

# But Who Will Chase the Hunters?

There is blood in Basira's mouth when she bites down on her tongue hard enough and that, if nothing else, is a comfort because the blood is hers. She unclenches her jaw only when the great beast before her passes by. The patrol car she’s gotten her hands on sits in the alley with the lights off, hiding in the perpetual twilight, because Basira can never be sure what the beast that was Daisy will do. This is especially true because the beast is not acting as Basira would expect her to.  
London is mostly empty now. It is not as bountiful as it was when the world first broke, which may have something to do with this change in behaviour. Daisy is running out of prey in the city; now the beast putters around upturning dumpsters and finding remains that other entities have left behind, as if she’s a scavenger instead of a perfectly constructed killing machine.  
Basira doesn’t understand why Daisy hasn’t left the city in search of new prey. With the Hunt at the reigns, Daisy should want nothing but blood. Basira is so sure that this should be the beast’s next move that she has been taking advantage of London’s height and mostly tracking the beast from rooftops and patios to save the gas she has in the car. But Daisy isn’t leaving.  
She spits out the wad of blood from the car window—disgusting, but hers. Very few things belonged to Basira anymore, anyways. Her prayer mat and Qur’an are in the back of the truck and there’s the clothes on her back, but even the emergency supplies she has technically belong to the Institute. They had been stockpiling, just in case. The patrol car she is living in looks very much like the one that she and Daisy used to share, maybe it’s even one they’ve been assigned before, but Basira has no right to be driving it. She barely had a right to it even when she was still technically an officer of the law. _Officer of the law_ seems like a stretch, given what they’d gotten up to and what they’d pretended not to when they’d had the power and protection of those shiny badges.  
Daisy took that from her—the illusion that Basira could be a cog turning the right way in a broken system, that she could do something good from the inside, that she could help people, that she could tilt the scales of power by doing the right thing. Or maybe Basira had given that illusion to Daisy willingly. When Basira had been a cog her teeth had been hitched to Daisy’s teeth, and they had spun and turned together. Maybe there would have been a way to unlatch the pair of them, but Basira knew she wouldn’t have let it happen. She was Daisy’s and Daisy’s was hers and if they went down, they went down as a pair. For Daisy she was brave and a coward, she was strong and she was weak, she was true and she was a liar. She would be anything for Daisy; she was all too happy to reshape herself as needed and when needed.  
Even this quest, this last request and grim errand, was Daisy’s. But because it was Daisy’s it was Basira’s—and Basira couldn’t for the life of her figure out why Daisy wasn’t acting like the hunter and the predator that Basira knew she should be. She wouldn’t pretend to be an expert, but she had seen Daisy Hunt before—she had seen her blown pupils, her heaving chest, her sharpened teeth, her curled hands. She had seen Daisy in various states of inhumanity and had sat with her and talked her down back to the place where they could be together more than once. The Hunt was never as peaceful and quiet as this and Basira wanted to know why.  
She waited a beat before unlocking the car door and stepping out, slinging her backpack over her shoulder and making sure that her gun was loaded. She left the car where it was and stepped out of the alleyway, hugging the city’s walls as she watched Daisy walk away—down the middle of the street as if to reinstate that London was dead and gone.  
Basira bit her lip before stepping into the middle of the street, looking around her for any other signs of life. She hadn’t seen any in weeks—no humans, and no avatars either. It was as if this part of London was very firmly claimed as hunting territory. She saw the Panopticon glowing in the distance but ignored it; that would be a problem for after she kept her promise. She has normalized the ashen grey sky above her. A breeze picked up and it should have carried Basira’s scent down the road and triggered Daisy’s killer instincts, but it didn’t. The beast that had once been Daisy simply walked on.  
It gave her hope in an impossible and undoubtedly foolish way. Daisy had wanted to be killed if she slipped into the Hunt and Basira couldn’t help but thinking that maybe, just maybe, Daisy wasn’t so far in. Her teeth were clean. The blood on her snout had dried. She was walking down the street and had seemingly no desire to hunt Basira. Maybe, just maybe, Daisy could be coaxed back home. Basira didn’t have a home, she had Daisy, and Daisy had her. Maybe they could be enough. Basira didn’t know what else could make a Hunter stop.  
Basira follows Daisy, doing her best to synchronize her footsteps with that of the great beast to lose the sound of her own feet. She tries to edge herself on, to make tonight the night that she keeps her promise. She will fire her weapon into the air to attract Daisy’s attention. She will stand where she is as the beast charges towards her. Then, when she is within range, Basira will empty her gun into Daisy. She doesn’t know how many bullets will be enough, but she will try to find out. She tries to reason herself out of her own conscience, the way she reasoned herself out of the Unknowing. It’s harder now. It used to be for Daisy’s sake that she reasoned her way out of terrible things they had done, folding over backwards and pretending that complexity sanctified them. For Daisy, she desperately wants to be right now. She desperately wants to believe that this thing, which is failing to act as a Hunter might, has a tiny part of Daisy still in it. Something left for Basira to coax back to her. She wants it so badly, the pain in her stomach is sharp.  
Then she realizes that she actually is in pain. It’s her lip, she’s bitten herself again. Basira spits out another mouthful of her own blood and her tongue flicks across her teeth as she does and finds something sharp. Sharper than a flat mollar in the back of her mouth ought to be.  
She inhales and it’s like being assaulted by information—by movements and traces and directions and locations and emotions and all kinds of other information that she has never, ever, smelled before.  
With her left hand, the right tightening around the gun, she reaches into her mouth. Her teeth are sharper and her mouth is… her mouth is fuller. There are more of them.  
She looks up to Daisy, Daisy who is still walking down the street. The wind picks up again and a new wave of information hits Basira, more specifically about the creature she’s watching. _Relaxed. Limping on her right—maybe an injury, definitely a weak point. Unaware. Keen hearing. Be quiet. Get her._  
The next breath Basira takes is deeper, more air rushes into her body than there could a second ago. Clarity overwhelms Basira as the world becomes sharp around her. She remembers sitting in a patrol car with Daisy, when Daisy didn’t look like this and when they’d been together—so it felt okay for Basira to do whatever she needed to keep Daisy safe and to keep her curse quiet. They had been sitting in the rain eating chips, and Daisy had tried to steal one of hers.  
_“Bite me,” Basira had said, curling over her chips protectively.  
“Don’t tempt me,” Daisy had said with a crooked smile._  
They had laughed at that, but since then Basira had never quite stopped thinking about how Hunters were made—about what made a Hunter.  
The world had cracked open and an ashen grey sky and a nightmarish landscape had fallen out, and now the Hunt cracked open over Basira’s head and the answer poured over her. One only had to hunt to be a hunter.  
She had never wondered before what happened to those who hunted Hunters.  
Of course, Daisy had tried to keep the Hunt inside. She had weakened and exhausted herself a little more every day, bottling up the Hunter that lived in her—but an entity that lived to chase and pursue and track wouldn’t let its own avatars get away, would it? If the Hunt sensed someone tracking and pursuing one of its own… of course it wouldn’t hold back in creating a chase. If a Hunter was hunted, what made them different from prey? And what was prey without a Hunter? Basira had never wondered before what happened to those who hunted Hunters.  
She wondered if Daisy would count this as freedom.  
Basira fired a warning shot into the air as she had planned this whole time, except she had meant it as a signal when it really was a warning now. Basira saw the beast that had been Daisy turn around and face her with those amber eyes one last time before her own consciousness flickered like a lightbulb burning out. A new light came on as the Hunt burned a fire in Basira so bright and hot that she did not feel the ways in which it tore and reshaped her body into that of a perfect predator.  
Daisy ran and the thing that was Basira pursued.


End file.
